Things We Learned This Week

Sam and Max video on Nintendo Channel.

It's buried several pages in, but there's sort of a preview of Sam and Max Season One up. It's one of those fake CG blooper things, but it's still pretty good. BUYING IT.

Also, does anybody else think that TV Show King looks ok? From the demo movie (also on Nintendo Channel), the questions look way too easy... but the basic concept of a simultaneous 4P quiz show with Wii Remotes seems like something that should have happened in Wii Year One.

Wow on the No More Heroes.

$30 at Target. Do yourself a favor and go get it (if you're over 18). Play it for just thirty minutes and I can almost guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised at least three times. Very, very different stuff. I'm definitely going to have more about this one later.

On the negative side, it looks like a PS2 game.

Every time I try to play something new, I end up losing hours to Mario Kart, GTA, or just dapping around on the Wii.

I still haven't done anything with Zack & Wiki or Portal. I understand Portal is not that long, so one of these nights I'm diving in. And now with No More Heroes in the mix, I'm feeling like completely tabling GTAIV because it's nice to have something completely incredible waiting on the near horizon. Even if I let it sit until August, it will still be awesome. And what about Metal Gear.

The problem with me preferring all of these story-focused games is that the longer I dally on completing them, the greater the chances I'll stumble into a key spoiler somewhere.

Bachelor glassware get.

One of the booths t Wizard World Philly was selling these nice glasses screened with images of various super heroes. Just like the ones you may recall from the 1970s. They did not take credit, or else I would have come home with four of them. I'm keeping an eye on their website for any specials. At the show, they only had Marvel glasses (the classic Ghost Rider glass was really, really nice), but they had a sign that a DC set was coming soon.

Nintendo Power ran out of Phantom Hourglass guides.

The renewal bonus for sticking with the new publishers of Nintendo Power was a strategy guide for Phantom Hourglass. Which I didn't really want, but whatever. Anyway, they ran out of them, so I got a poster book instead. There's some nice imagery in there, even covering games that you either forgot about (hey! a THIRD Metroid Prime game!) or notable third-parties (Okami, that Sonic DS RPG)... but I can't say I really wanted a bunch of magazine page-sized posters with staple holes in the middle either.

Under Nintendo's ownership, the annual freebie of a t-shirt or some rare trinket was a much better deal.

So yeah, Galaxy Colosseum.

Freakin' Nintendo. They love to tell nobody nothing.

The latest Mario Kart online tournament takes place in a battle stage that nobody knew existed - the Mario Galaxy-inspired Galaxy Colosseum - and features a goal that does not appear in the main game - a boss attack round similar to the event challenges in Mario Kart DS. You have to knock a bunch of Spiky Topmen off the platform.

Isn't this classic Nintendo? Here's something certifiably awesome - completely new content only available during the special online tourneys - and they never say one word about it.

Now the question is, can you somehow unlock Galaxy Colosseum for offline play... or is the level not even physically on the disk? I can't imagine Nintendo actually doing this, but what if they could keep crafting new stages and releasing them for limited-time download-only online play? INFINITE KART.